


Gnothe Seauton

by wintergrey



Series: Vade Mecum [7]
Category: Captain America, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amnesia, Dissociation, Friendship, Guilt, Homelessness, Love, M/M, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 17:52:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1866966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintergrey/pseuds/wintergrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Know yourself.</i> (Greek)</p><blockquote>
  <p>"I’m Bucky,” he murmurs at the ghost of himself reflected in a bus shelter. “That’s who Bucky is.”</p>
  <p>It gets no easier. Bucky doesn’t forget but he has to live with what he’s done. He sleeps in alleys, shelters behind dumpsters, thinks nothing of it. It’s hard to believe he doesn’t belong there.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	Gnothe Seauton

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: For the next several instalments, life gets a little bumpy for everyone. Things are hard when everyone in the family is dealing with some kind of trauma. There are bumps and bruises and bruised feelings and some bad words—but lots of love nonetheless. If that kind of thing being unresolved for a few instalments is stressful for you, check back in at _Stet Fortuna Domas: Let the fortune of the house stand _and catch up.__
> 
> * * *
> 
> __

Who the hell is Bucky?

Sometimes, he knows. Sometimes he doesn’t. When he doesn’t know, all he has left is the question.

He tries to go back, to find himself, to find the person who knows him. The answer is there somewhere. When he knows himself, he knows where to go, and he tries.

He gets lost along the way. The harder he tries, the further away he finds himself. Once, he wakes up in Prague with no idea how he got there. The face on the passport is his but the name isn’t. It could be, because he doesn’t know his name, but it isn’t.

He tries to go back. This time, he makes it as far as a museum where he stands and stares at his own face, the way he stared at the passport. The name written beside it is his. He stands there a long time, searching that other man’s face.

The prickling on his skin says he’s being watched. He looks down to see a child looking back up at him. It has short hair like cornsilk and eyes like a summer sky. Do they talk when they’re that small? Below his waist, above his knee. Children are a foreign thing. Childhood. Nearly a hundred years ago.

“You look like him,” the child says clearly.

“I look like a lot of people,” he says, and the child’s face falls. As though his joints are rusty, he responds to the expression. His hand remembers how to touch the child lightly on the hair. “You’re right. I do look like him.”

He knows who Bucky is. Not the way he knew before, as though looking at his own personnel file. He knows who Bucky is because he’s in Bucky’s skin. As he walks, his spine loosens and his stride lengthens. He walks like Bucky, sounds like him when he orders a hot dog at a street cart and lets the taste tie the present to the past. When he’s done, he tosses his crumpled napkin in the garbage.

“I’m Bucky,” he murmurs at the ghost of himself reflected in a bus shelter. “That’s who Bucky is.”

It gets no easier. Bucky doesn’t forget but he has to live with what he’s done. He sleeps in alleys, shelters behind dumpsters, thinks nothing of it. It’s hard to believe he doesn’t belong there.

He wants someone to tell him it’s not true. He just doesn’t know who could say it that he’d believe. On a grey morning, the world is shrouded in damp. He’s nearly invisible in the shadows at the edge of a stand of trees where he comes to watch sometimes.

Steve would tell him he doesn’t belong there. That he could be redeemed. But Steve would tell him even if it wasn’t true. Steve believes in him too much—Bucky doesn’t trust him. Bucky doesn’t trust himself around Steve.

Still, he can be this close and all he feels is hollow nostalgia where his bones should be. It makes him light like a bird. Speaking of birds...

Steve is there with the other man, the one he’s always with now. Sam. The one who had the wings until Bucky broke them before he knew who the hell Bucky was. He’s watched them for weeks now, even when he didn’t know who he was. Sometimes they’d go away and he’s not sure why. Sometimes he’d go away and he’s not sure why. Then they’d come back, he’d come back, and everything would be right again.

Sam was sick for a while, Bucky thinks. He saw them one day, saw Sam leave early—Steve wasn’t happy. Then they didn’t come back for days. He knows where Sam lives, though, so he checked there. Sam didn’t come out for a long time. Bucky didn’t want something to be wrong with Sam. He likes the way Steve laughs when he’s with Sam. Nothing can be that bad if Steve’s happy.  
  
Not even Bucky being what he is.

Sam goes to the VA, talks to people there. Soldiers talk to him about what they’ve done and how they live with it. Bucky likes going to the VA, even if he can’t follow Sam in—he can ghost close enough to listen sometimes, but that’s dangerous. Bucky would go in, if he were himself, and so he feels more like Bucky when he goes there with Sam.

Bucky doesn’t know Sam but he trusts him. The other soldiers trust him. Steve trusts him. Bucky thinks Sam would tell him the truth about where he belongs. At the very least, Sam wouldn’t let Steve be in danger and that’s what matters.

Bucky can’t do anything here, though. He doesn’t want to interrupt. This is their time, in the soft hours of early morning, just them and the crunch of their feet on the cinder track, their voices and their laughter washing up against the trees like the waves of a cool lake lapping the shore. Just them and Bucky.

He doesn’t stay long. He just wants to know they’re there. It’s good to know before he drifts into the day to find a way to feed himself and a way to live with who he is.

It’s later that day, when he’s wolfing down flavourless-salty soup at a familiar shelter, that he realizes why they go away.

“They’re looking for you,” he says to himself, then looks around to make sure he didn’t say that out loud. Sometimes when it’s hard for Bucky to be the same person as he is, he talks to Bucky as though they’re two people in one skin.

“Was I always this stupid?” Bucky wants to know. “Because I don’t remember me being this stupid.”

“Amnesia, asshole,” he says to Bucky. The guy can be a bit of a prick when he’s hungry. “Brainwashing. They fucked us up.”

“Of course Steve’s looking for me.” Bucky rolls his eyes. “Can’t believe we didn’t think of that.”

“We should tell them where we are.” Now that he realizes—now that Bucky realizes Steve and Sam are trying to track him down—it seems indecent to keep lurking.

“I don’t know,” Bucky says. He’s poking at the soup now, appetite gone. “I don’t want to ruin things for them. They’re happy.”

“They’re looking for you,” he tells himself. “If they were really happy not knowing, they wouldn’t be looking for you.”

“For us. They’re looking for us. For me.” Bucky finishes his soup. No idea when he’s going to eat again.

He calls in a tip to a hotline, a number he’s seen on the television before ticking across the screen under his likeness.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m sure I saw him near the Taft Bridge a few days in a row now.” It’s open, it’s public without being crowded, there’s plenty of places to go if he needs to run. Plenty of places for people to run from him. “Yes, ma’am. Prosthetic arm. Can’t miss it. He’s talking to himself.” Now, he just has to go there and wait.

The waiting is hard. He can’t go to the usual places in case they’re looking for him here. The weather is good but food is scarce.

At night, he can feel the years press on him. He remembers the nights he wondered if someone were looking for him without knowing who it would be or why they would care. All those nights add up to years within the years he’s lost.

He misses them. They don’t even know Bucky’s there and he misses them. Without seeing them there’s nothing to separate one span of twenty-four hours from the next. He prowls the bridge, looking for them, calls the hotline again.

Someone has to come. He’s afraid Bucky won’t be here when they do, if they take any longer. He tells himself over and over, “You’re Bucky. It’s you.”

Who the hell is Bucky? “Me. It’s me.”

But it’s hard to remember when he’s afraid. If they would just come back, things would be right. He’s certain they’re never coming back—or is he the one who has to come back?—when he hears someone calling.

“Bucky!”

Bucky’s turning around at the same time as he realizes he can’t do this. It’s too hard to remember he’s Bucky and he’s too afraid he’s going to hurt the man loping over the bridge toward him.

Steve, it’s Steve, he should be happy to see Steve. Steve is sunshine and blue sky inside a person, gold hair and eyes like summer.

“Baby, stop.” Someone catches up to Steve. Warm, dark hand on Steve’s arm, warm voice, warm eyes. Sam is warm. Safe. “It’s okay, Bucky.”

For a moment, Bucky thinks it’s going to be okay. The sun is on the back of his neck. It shimmers in Steve’s golden hair, glitters in Sam’s dark eyes. Sam’s looking at Bucky, still, calm and steady.

“It’s good to see you,” Sam says. “We’ve been worried about you.”

Now that he has to talk, Bucky isn’t sure what to say, how to say it. Words he doesn’t want to speak war with the ones that want to be said. He can’t say—can’t do—the things he feels compelled to do and say.

“Take your time.” Sam still talks and that’s okay because it’s easier. He doesn’t know Sam, doesn’t have a protocol to follow for Sam.

“I called,” Bucky manages to say.

“I knew it was you.” When Bucky glances at Steve, there’s so much hope in his face. Bucky doesn’t remember ever being that hopeful, ever wanting anything as much as Steve wants him to be okay right now. “I knew your voice.”

“I sound like me.” Bucky knows it, Steve knows it. This is who he is. The protocols loosen their grip as he gets back into his body, takes it over again. “I feel like me. A little.”

“It’s you.” Steve reaches for him, touches him on the shoulder.

Bucky expects Steve’s hand to pass right through as though he’s a ghost, but it doesn’t. Steve’s hand rests on his shoulder, closing a little to hold onto him. Bucky lets his gaze follow from that hand up Steve’s arm and all the way to Steve’s face, so he can see the truth reflected there.

“It’s me,” he says to Steve. “I’m Bucky. I remember.” He remembers Brooklyn streets after rain, the crack of a baseball off a bat, the wheeze of car horns, laundry waving like pennants against a cerulean fall sky as they kick an empty tin can back and forth all the way home from school.

“Yeah, you are. C’mere.” Steve pulls him in and Bucky’s body remembers what to do, remembers how to wraps his arms around Steve and put his head on Steve’s shoulder and just hold on.

Steve hugs him as though he’s holding all Bucky’s broken parts together and—right then, just then—Bucky knows exactly who he is all the way back to the day he learned to tie his own shoes, his mom’s soft hands on his and her voice in his ear.

Then Steve’s chin lifts, his gaze fixes somewhere beyond Bucky’s shoulder. He lets go of Bucky a little and Bucky tries to carve into his mind how it felt to be whole.

“Why are they here?” Steve’s tone is flat, furious, even though his voice is soft. “I thought we were clear on this. You talked to Rhodes.”

“I don’t think those are his people. It’s okay, though,” Sam says, but he doesn’t sound certain the same way. “We just need to go now. Bucky, come on.” Sam reaches out, sets his hand on Bucky’s elbow, an anchor as Steve lets go.

“Stay with Sam, Bucky.” Steve steps around Bucky, keeps walking toward the far end of the bridge. Straight down the middle of the road. Head up, shoulders back.

At first, Bucky doesn’t look past him, he’s caught in reading Steve’s familiar shape. The same lines of righteous indignation are written in him as when Steve was small; when they were small.

Then Bucky looks beyond to a wall of men in dark uniforms. Body armour. The guns are out, the air is full of barked orders. Bucky feels a switch flip in him—feels it but can’t stop it.

“No, no, no.” His programming is a movie playing in his mind, his body is moving like a freight train—the weight of all those years behind it make him feel unstoppable.

Bucky’s program marks his targets for him, starting with Steve. The knife in his hand knows its place already, between two vertebra just above Steve’s collar, just below the golden wisps of his hair. Steve spreads his arms as though, somehow, he’s going to stop a hail of bullets not just with his body but with his intentions and he never looks back. He trusts Bucky.

Bucky buries the knife inches deep into the yellow line between Steve’s feet. He changes direction with a twist that he feels in his gut and head at once. The movie playing in his mind burns and bubbles, the film snaps in two. He knows his way out. He leaps, pushes off the high railing with one foot, and is gone. It’s a long way down.

 


End file.
